


Signal to Noise

by Hth



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Episode Related: Second Chance, M/M, None - Freeform, Series: Sixteen Instinctual Behaviors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-10
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-11 00:21:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/791884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hth/pseuds/Hth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim was right about the strip club; Blair is a really friendly guy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Signal to Noise

**Author's Note:**

> Having committed to Maya as a plot point back in "White Elephant," I figured I was honorbound to give her another go here.

## Signal to Noise

by Betty Plotnick

Author's webpage: <http://internettrash.com/users/livia/plotnick/betty.htm>

Author's disclaimer: Jim, Blair, and the Sentinel Thing belong to Pet Fly. Denny's Family Restaurant may belong to Mallory Klohn; I'm not sure.

* * *
    
    
                   Signal to Noise
                   by Betty Plotnick
    

As it turned out, Jim had been right all along about taking Sandburg to a strip club. It was creepy. 

Not exactly because it threatened to tarnish Jim's unaccountably still fresh-and-innocent image of Blair; he figured if the constant parade of women who became suddenly moist-lipped and heavy- lidded when Blair flashed a grin at them hadn't driven the idea out of Jim's head that the kid was spiritually one step to the left of the friendly kid who always stayed after the seventh-grade dance to help the decorating committee get the balloons down from the gym ceiling, nothing would. No, in Jim Ellison's mind, his roommate was pure of heart and wholly virtuous in motive at all times. He figured that would pretty much remain the case until Jim himself got around to doing the tarnishing. 

Which, right there, was another potential source of creep-factor. Sandburg wasn't exactly Jim's - - whatever -- well, he _was_ Jim's whatever, definitely, but not that kind of whatever. But even without being whatever to Jim, the two of them were certainly, absolutely...whatever. 

Okay, try again, Jim ordered himself. Precision counts. He wasn't Blair Sandburg's lover, but after what might as well have been a lifetime of sharing every intimate detail of his life and his psyche with Sandburg, damn the torpedoes and to hell with any tenuous attempt at personal privacy on either of their parts, he was Blair's -- whatever. Damn, doing well there for a while. Back up. He was Blair's...companion; they were what Jim's father would have called an "item"; had Sandburg really been that wholesome middle-school naif, they'd be going steady. 

And yet it wasn't their subliminal, mostly unarticulated romantic relationship that made Jim seriously uncomfortable about sitting next to Blair at Ms. Tease Gentleman's Club. That, Jim could handle. It was more...it was just that...Blair was _doing_ it all wrong. He, quite frankly, _sucked_ at watching strippers. 

Jim obeyed the rules. He ordered just enough drinks to keep the cocktail waitresses from being pissed off at him, and he sat facing the stage with his eyes forward, and he watched the damn show. That was the point, right? You sat, you drank, you watched. If you were a Sentinel, maybe you...browsed a bit, focusing now on the play of the muscles of an inner thigh, now on the slight beading of sweat in cleavage or the reflection of orange light off dark brown skin, the pulse in her throat, the subtle smell of wet skin, processed floral products of some kind, and pot smoke that radiated gently off of her. You tipped the nice lady when she sat on your lap. How hard was this to figure out? 

Sandburg, on the other hand, was *everywhere.* He was working the crowd better than the goddamn waitresses. 

He struck up a conversation, for Christ's sake, with the guy who was having his bachelor party at the next table over, whose name was Max and hailed from Cascade, but met his fiancee Jessica at college in Boulder, Colorado, where Blair had once spent a spring break bicycling, and it just so happened that Max worked in a mountain bike shop during high school and knew where Blair should go to get a good deal on the same kind of bike that one of the big messenger companies in town used. 

He managed to get behind the bar and show the bartender, a young ex-Marine with square glasses and a square jaw named Alfonzo, how to make some insanely rich drink with kahlua, vodka, galliano, and cream. It caught on with the masses, and Sandburg made almost twenty bucks in tips. 

And, of course, he found a way to cozy up to one of the dancers, whose name was Corinna. She was an undergrad at Rainier, majoring in Peace Studies, and they had enough professorial acquaintances in common to make Jim ready to club them both to death with a microbrewery bottle. Blair scored her older sister's phone number. He also mentioned in conversation that Jim was a police officer, which effectively quashed Jim's chances for a second lap dance even if he tipped like Aristotle Onassis. 

All in all, Sandburg had managed to completely botch the ridiculously simple post-breakup outing for the second time. Jim missed the fucking garage sales. 

By one in the morning, Jim was ready to pronounce Blair cured, his work here done, and both of them ready to call it a night. "Sure," Blair said easily when he suggested the latter, and then followed it up with, "Well..." 

"Well?" Jim already had his keys in his hand; he jingled them impatiently as they waited for the crosswalk light to change so they could get across to the parking lot. 

"It's not _that_ late," Blair said, and he looked up at Jim and smiled with goodwill toward man in his seventh-grade *you guys need a hand with that?* eyes, and somehow -- _no_ telling at this point exactly how -- Jim discovered that not only did Alfonzo the bartender's ex-drill sergeant now own a Laser Tag place up north, but that occasionally he ran the place all night long as a private party for friends of friends, and if anyone was a friend of friends, it was Blair Sandburg, which made Jim a friend of friends of friends, and it in fact _was_ that late, but Jim offered to drop him off at least, which stretched into going in for a few minutes just to check the place out, make sure Blair wasn't getting into something stupid, and it turned out that while the green team was mostly Rainier geeks, the red team was largely Alfonzo the bartender's ex-drill sergeant Tom's military and ex-military friends, so the spirit of things seemed to demand that Jim stay for at least one game. 

"You. Cheating. Bastard," Blair accused two and a half hours later, when his tenth death put him out of the game for good. 

Jim shrugged and adjusted the blinking shoulder targets, whose straps never seemed to size quite right to keep from digging in under his arms. "What do you want me to do, Chief? It's a genetic thing." 

"I _hate_ you." 

"I know," Jim said, feeling amazingly indulgent, given how ready he'd been to have Blair put to sleep at about midnight. "Come on, Blair, I thought you weren't competitive." 

"I -- I'm not. Really. I mean, of course, all primates respond on some neurochemical level to the perceptions of increased social status that accompany the defeat of an enemy, whether real or ritualized. Serotonin levels--" 

"Let's get out of here, Cheetah. I'll buy you breakfast." 

The waitress at Denny's had a son who had been in Blair's incoming freshman class at Rainier; they'd played intramural Ultimate Frisbee together. He'd been ordained as a priest last year in Massachusetts, which made Blair's mouth fold up oddly when he got the news, but he didn't say anything except "Cool." 

"What?" Jim asked once the waitress was out of earshot. 

"I used to sleep with him," Blair shrugged, and Jim tried not to suck coffee up into his nose laughing. "Is that funny?" Blair asked, seeming genuinely curious. 

Jim wiped at his nose with a napkin. "I don't know. I just...I'm just fascinated by this glimpse into the well-oiled machine that is the Sandburg Social Life. Have you ever gone _anywhere_ without knowing someone or meeting someone or otherwise weaseling your way into something?" 

Sandburg looked at him for a minute, visibly trying to decide if he was being jabbed at or not. "It's just a matter of paying attention. I mean, you'd be able to do the same thing if you weren't so-- didn't keep to yourself so much." 

"'Weren't so self-absorbed?'" Jim translated mildly. "Is that where you were going with that?" 

"No offense." 

"Right." 

"Hey, we don't all have your genetic advantages." Something in his voice or his lazily traveling eyes seemed to encompass more than just the senses when he said that, and Jim fought down a little smirk. "Some of us have to work at widening our social circles." 

"Sandburg, your social circle looks like the Prime Meridian. I think you can safely take a break." Jim wasn't even sure why he was picking at this; there was just some subtle sense of displacement about the whole night, something that bugged him about Blair's burst of manic friendliness. Maybe it was jealousy, maybe it _was_ weird because Blair was his and he was Blair's and possession was nine-tenths of the law of the jungle...but Jim didn't think so. This was about Blair, not him. 

"You just never know when it's going to be important to have a friend in the right place. How d'you think I found you, you know?" 

The choice of words brought Jim up short -- how did I _find_ you, not how did we meet. Meant to imply that Sandburg had added him to some constantly growing collection of advantageously placed friends and acquaintances...or to imply that Jim once had been lost and now was found? 

*Was blind, but now I see....* Jim's mother used to sing that when she put her sons to bed. 

To shake off the sudden drag of memory, Jim said, "I just can't imagine where you get the energy to maintain every third person in Cascade as a friend. It's gonna take me a week just to recover from tonight." 

"Well, I'm young," Blair offered jauntily, and grinned at Jim's narrow-eyed look. "I dunno. Jim, it's really not that big a deal. It's not like I send all these people birthday cards every year. Most of them, you know, they're just one-shot deals. We chat, maybe the name sticks in your brain. They're just...friends of friends." 

"Emotional clutter," Jim said, suddenly feeling tired and vaguely fatalistic. "You're just a...people pack-rat. You don't do anything with them, but you don't see the point of throwing them away, either." 

"Way to make it sound manipulative, Jim. They're just acquaintances, okay? I like to be friendly; what's your point?" 

"How are you feeling?" 

Blair looked at him like he'd suddenly started speaking Finnish. "What? Fine." 

"Better?" 

"What?" 

"*Maya,* you asshole. You wanted to go out because you said you had to get your mind off Maya. Ring a bell? Speaking of one-shot deals." 

The primate in Jim had scored a definite serotonin-enhancing conversational victory, judging from the sudden shocked pallor of Blair's skin and his widened eyes, but Jim's more human parts felt more guilty than socially advantaged. "I...." Blair closed his mouth, frowned, and rubbed his eyes. "Fuck. You're right. I just didn't -- it wasn't the same this time. I mean, I felt *something,* but...." 

"It's no big deal, Chief," Jim assured him. "It's been a year; you've changed, she's changed. It was bound to be different." 

"Okay, you've made your point. I'm shallow and fickle, all my friends are just so much social detritus. I didn't learn during my formative years to do anything more than ingratiate myself with a new set of people and then move on, and so now I'm totally incapable of dealing with people on anything more than a superficial and transitory level. Congratulations. You figured me out." 

"Sandburg. Don't be...don't be stupid." 

"I'm not *stupid,* Jim. I may be an asshole, but I can't go with you on the stupid thing." 

For the sake of their privacy, Jim waited to respond until the waitress had settled his breakfast skillet and Blair's Moons Over My Hammy on the table, refilled Jim's coffee, and absented herself again. Normally, that much time to think would have given Jim a clear direction to go in, but somehow everything he thought of saying either had no purpose or steered dangerously close to a level of sentimentality Jim was only comfortable succumbing to when he was drunk or about to get laid. *You'll meet the right woman someday* was patronizing, meaningless, and quite possibly not even remotely true. *You deal with me, every single day, on a level like no one I've ever known* was...hard to say. Very fucking hard to say, which was exactly the reason that after more than a year, Jim was still Blair's whatever instead of his *whatever.* 

"I had this same problem," he finally said, slowly, mixing the peppers deep into his scrambled eggs with elaborate care. "With my senses." 

"Jim, what are you talking about?" Blair asked, sounding morose and vaguely affronted at the same time. 

"I'm _telling_ you; just shut up and listen. It's like...all my life, in the Army and on the force, I was trained to see as much as possible. To be aware of my surroundings, three hundred and sixty degrees, every detail. I was watching and listening and noticing, all the time, like it was life-or- death, when it was and when it wasn't, both. And then when the senses came into play, there was no way I could keep that up. It was way too much, too constant." 

"Not only is that _not_ the same as my problem, but how come your hashbrowns are totally fine and mine have the texture of fresh seaweed?" 

Jim took a slow breath, reminding himself that Sandburg was always a bitch when he was in angst about something, and the worst thing Jim could do was reward his behavior with any attention at all. "You want my hashbrowns?" 

"Yes." 

"Take them. Your problem is like my problem, because we both think -- or we thought -- in terms of quantity. Never know when you might need someone's help. Never know when seeing some little thing out of place might save your life. So you want more, all the time, more contacts, more details, constant input. And then you get to the point where...it's too much. And the more you have, the more you realize you don't have *more,* you just have...more." 

All right, so it was five in the morning on a day that had not been red-letter for Jim's vocabulary to begin with. But Sandburg was no idiot, and he was thankfully nodding slowly, falling into step with Jim's thought processes in that way that he always managed to do, eventually. "Okay. There's a parallel there. I see it. That's cool. So you're saying if I cut back a little on the quantity, I'll have more, like, psychological energy to invest in cultivating quality relationships -- more emotional focus, like you have more sensory focus now." 

"S-sort of." Except utterly not. So try again. Precision counts. "I'm saying that -- you already have focus. You're just focused on the possibility that you'll get hurt. You're focused on pulling people in, like they feed something in you and you're scared to death of a famine. I...felt that way. That's how I used to feel, like no matter how safe I was, there was always the chance that in the next second I *wouldn't* be, and I'd just get one warning, once chance to react. But when you...have a new ability...like the Sentinel thing, or a new...type of safety, a new way to know that you won't get caught out in the cold, then you can...let it go. You don't have to be scared anymore." 

Sandburg was still looking down at his plate, and Jim was aware of his knee jumping up and down in place under the table nervously, the rush of motion and the soft sound of sneaker soles against the linoleum. "It's all about who you know, Jim. That's how you get ahead in the real world; I mean, you know that." 

"Yeah. It is all about who you know. I'm just saying...take a look at who you know." 

"A third of Cascade?" 

"Me, Chief. You know me." 

He raised his eyes to Jim, searching him and challenging him at the same time. "You think you're all I'm ever going to need? You think it doesn't matter who else I can't maintain a relationship with because I--" 

"Because you found me." 

"I'm scared anyway," Blair said, and Jim remembered why Blair Sandburg kept on amazing him. He didn't have to be drunk or half naked to say something sincere; he was more of a man than that. 

"When you first taught me how to dial down...I was fucking scared out of my mind. It felt like I was offering to blindfold myself with live ammo all around me. It felt like I was giving up the last control I had to my name." 

"You're a brave guy," Blair said, a little flatly. 

"Not really. I just knew I had to do it. I didn't realize until later that it was worth it. If I hadn't had you there, pushing me into it...I probably would have stayed scared forever." Maybe that, Jim thought with a sudden shock of recognition, was why Sentinels had partners in the field; not for the zone-out factor, which could be controlled, but to handle all the millions of things that *couldn't* be controlled. Maybe it was absurd to ask a Sentinel to dial down without giving him something to trust other than his own strength. Later, he'd mention that to Sandburg; it had been a while since Jim had earned his keep in the anthropological arena. 

Blair ate his sandwich, his knee still going hop-hop-hop under the table. The waitress came back to check on them, and Blair smiled brightly at her, and as soon as she was gone the expression on his face deepened back into absorbed concentration. "I want to keep dating," he finally said, abruptly. 

"Okay," Jim said, wondering if that meant something he wasn't picking up on. 

"I mean, I get what you're saying. I know it's okay to...dial down a little. I know you're not going anywhere. But things being the way they are right now, I still need...I still need a _little_ control, you know, Jim? Not a lot, but I just--" 

"It's okay. I'm not trying to lock you up in the loft or anything. Just...think about what matters, and what's just...sound and fury. Just think about it, okay?" 

"I know. I do. This is just, like, a fear-based thing. That's all." 

"I'll kick your fucking ass if you don't quit being afraid of me," Jim deadpanned. 

Blair laughed delightedly and held up his hands. "Whoa, whoa, man! I'm not afraid, okay?" 

"See that you aren't," Jim said in his best Ellison growl, the one that always made Blair grin so hard his eyes creased at the corners. He loved it when Sandburg did that just for him. 


End file.
